Free Island Girls by Nancy Thayer

herself:
Stop right there
.
    Years had passed since that horrible summer. At boarding school and college, Meg had met girls whose families made her own look enviable. World literature had shown her families who killed one another for land, money, or power. What she’d gone through was nothing to cry about. It was only complicated and it had been unfair, but life was complicated and unfair.
God
, she said to herself,
stop whining
.
    Suddenly the sun was too hot, and her back hurt from lying in the sand. She began to gather up her stuff.
    As she did, a blonde woman, fortyish, spread out her towel next to Meg and slathered sunblock on her arms.
    “Hi,” she chirped pleasantly to Meg.
    Preoccupied, Meg replied briefly, “Hello.”
    “Oh, am I disturbing you?” the blonde asked.
    “What? Oh no, not at all. I just remembered something I’ve got to do.”
    Meg rose, picked up her beach bag, and tracked up through the hot sand, wondering why the other woman had seemed disappointed at her departure.

EIGHT
    Justine had always been a beauty. She’d nurtured this quality with careful nutrition, yoga, exercise, spa treatments, manicures, pedicures, and, in the past five or so years, weekly visits to the hairdresser. Clothes shopping had been a serious occupation for her, and she’d utilized great taste, not to mention money, in decorating their large, historic Belmont house to perfection.
    Now she wandered around the perfect house in a stained robe, her hair lank, tipped with split ends. Makeup hadn’t touched her face since she returned from Rory’s funeral, and as far as nutrition—well, she was getting most of that from wine.
    How would she get through the rest of her life without Rory?
    How was she going to get through the next
hour
without Rory? He was the love of her life.
    They’d met at the perfume counter in the Natick Mall Lord & Taylor. Rory was looking for a present for a client, he told her, an older woman who had just purchased a posh town house. Hewanted something classy, and his glance at her let her understand he knew she was all about classy.
    Tall, wide-shouldered, blue-eyed, and red-haired, Rory exuded confidence, joie de vivre, and sexuality. He laughed easily, his eyes twinkled, and when they touched—so Justine could spray perfume on his wrist—angels sang.
    He took a long time selecting his gift—Chanel No. 5—and returned the next day saying he needed to buy perfume for his secretary’s birthday.
    The third time he came, he told her with an honest nervousness that he was buying a present for his wife. Perhaps they could talk? He’d like to talk. Rory took her to lunch.
    She was thirty. She’d had a child out of wedlock, little Jenny, who was now nine and had never had a father. Nothing tragic, Justine confessed, only foolish. She’d made a mistake when she was in college and became a single mother at twenty. She’d married once when she was twenty-five. Her husband had been not exactly mean to his stepdaughter but cold. Cold to five-year-old Jenny. That marriage hadn’t lasted a year. After that, Justine had sworn she’d never marry again.
    Rory told Justine he was thirty-nine, a successful real estate broker, and husband to a nice woman named Cyndi. Together they had a little girl, Meg, just nine years old.
    “We each have a daughter nine years old,” they said to each other in a kind of awe, as if this formed an unbreakable bond between them.
    Rory had been married once before, briefly, to a woman named Nora, and they had a daughter, too, twelve-year-old Arden. “Classy name,” Justine told him.
    “She’s a classy kid. Smart as a whip, too. I don’t see her as often as I’d like, but every other week and most of the summer Arden stays with Cyndi, Meg, and me.”
    “You all get along?” Justine asked.
    “As well as any family, I suppose.” Rory had hesitated, then sat back in his chair and regarded her helplessly. “What are we going to do?”
    Heart aching, Justine aimed for